#OfTwoMinds.com

[darkmaga-returns]

By Charles Hugh Smith

OfTwoMinds.com

November 13, 2024

The soaring costs of home ownership are changing the metrics of unaffordability in important ways.

We all know that buying a house is now unaffordable, but owning a house is increasingly unaffordable, too. Gordon Long and I have laid out the sobering explosion of the costs of homeownership, a rise that shows no signs of slowing, much less reversing.

It would be nice to attribute it all to one source or one villain, but alas, it isn’t that easy. Costs are rising across the board for many reasons, none of which are reversible by enacting a policy tweak or two.

For context, let’s start with inflation since 2020 and the cost of buying a house. Truflation pegs the aggregate inflation (a.k.a. loss of the purchasing power of the US dollar in our domestic economy) at 26% since January 2020. All else being equal, we would expect the cost of housing to have risen by about 25%.

But according to the Case-Shiller national housing index, which tracks the purchase prices paid for each house over time, housing costs rose an eye-watering 45% since January 2020, as the index soared from 220 to 320.

Traditionally, the primary cost of home ownership everyone tracks is the mortgage payment, the famous monthly nut of principal and interest, which of course goes up with the purchase price and the interest rate of the mortgage.

As we all know, both the purchase price and the interest rate have gone up significantly, pushing the mortgage payment as a percentage of median household income up to levels that exceed the previous peak in Housing Bubble #1 circa 2006-08.

[americanyellowvest]

The Social Recession Is Accelerating oftwominds.com August 21, 2024 View Original Did wages rise 10-fold to match the 10-fold rise in the cost of a modest house? No. That is social recession in a nutshell. A reader asked about the term social recession which he’d noted in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. Here is the paragraph: “Stagnation in opportunities…

[lovebooksgroup]

COMING SOON - #Virtualbooktour |Pills, Shills, and the Psychiatry Wars by Doug Bremner | 25th March – 2nd April | Proudly organised by @lovebookstours #BookTour #LBTCrew #Bookreviews

COMING SOON - #Virtualbooktour |Pills, Shills, and the Psychiatry Wars by Doug Bremner | 25th March – 2nd April | Proudly organised by @lovebookstours https://www.amazon.com/Pills-Shills-Psychiatry-Wars-Healthcare-ebook/dp #BookTour #LBTCrew #Bookreviews

Pills, Shills, and the Psychiatry Wars by Doug Bremner 25th March – 2nd April  Genre: Non-fiction Blurb Blurb  The mainstream media… are flailing and failing… Dr. Douglas Bremner [is] an exceedingly rare voice of scepticism arrayed against the advertising and lobbying might of the multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry.” Charles Hugh Smith, at oftwominds.com. “Pills, Shills, and the…

[rielpolitik]

DAS KAPITAL: 'Reinventing Democracy', Hubris, Misrule & The Elite Echo-Chamber

Source – oftwominds.com “…The only possible conclusion: if we don’t democratize capital, democracy is boiled away. I wish this could be sugarcoated, but it’s much like my other aphorism: if we don’t change the way money is created and distributed, we’ve change nothing” Reinventing Democracy The whole point of democracy and free markets is to force competition on elites who are desperate to…

[roguenewsdao]

Un-Merry Christmas: The Perverse Incentives to Over-Consume and Over-Spend

In the current Mode of Production, the solution to every social and economic ill is to "grow our way out of it."

The solution to unemployment: jump-start growth by expanding consumption, spending and borrowing.

The solution to stagnant wages: jump-start growth.

The solution to declining profits: jump-start growth.

The solution to government deficit spending: jump-start growth.

And so on.

So what happens when most people have not just the basics of life, but a surplus of stuff? Where is the growth going to come from if people already have everything?

The answer is three-fold:

1. Replace a perfectly good product with a new product and dump the old one in the landfill.

2. Buy duplicates and put the surplus products in the closet or storage facility.

3. Buy gimmicks (Pet Rocks, etc.) that are tossed in the dump shortly after the holiday gift-giving season ends.

But does this Landfill Economy make sense?��The cheap oil is about gone, and so does it make any rational sense to burn the last of the cheap fossil fuels on assembling stuff nobody needs in China, shipping it thousands of miles to retailers or Amazon warehouses, adding it to the immense piles of stuff most households already own, and then shipping the old but still functional products to the landfill, just to keep the economy humming?

This is of course insane. Decisions aren't being made as if scarcity matters; the goals and incentives are set to encourage perverse and destructive overconsumption and overspending: not only are we squandering resources in the sacrifice to the false gods of "growth," we're indebting households to do so, stripping income that could have been saved and invested in productive uses.

In the lunatic asylum of the current economic model, media anchors sport grins of delirious joy when reporting increases in holiday spending, as if a bump higher from $680 billion to $700 billion is a gargantuan win for the flailing economy.

Wasting resources, capital and income on stuff nobody really needs is a monumental disaster on multiple fronts. Rather than establish incentives to conserve and invest wisely, our system glorifies waste and the destruction of income and capital, as if burning time, capital, resources and wealth on stuff nobody needs is strengthening the economy.

Isn't it obvious that this system is a one-way path to collapse? Isn't it obvious that burning resources and capital to haul stuff to the landfill at an ever-increasing rate is madness, folly, recklessness and stupidity combined?

Isn't it obvious that if we set out to design the most perverse, toxic and doomed system possible, we'd end up with the Keynesian Cargo Cult's insane permanent growth/Landfill Economy?

It doesn't have to be this way. I've sketched out a sustainable, human-scale Mode of Production/way of living in my two books, Money and Work Unchained and A Radically Beneficial World.

A new arrangement is inevitable. Our choice boils down to changing our understanding and Mode of Production now, before the whole perverse structure falls apart, or waiting for scarcities and self-serving systems to collapse the current arrangement, leaving the ill-prepared and shell-shocked populace to sift through the wreckage.

Common sense suggests the first option is the wiser choice, but common sense is scarce in a world trapped in a bizarre Keynesian madness.  I'm offering my new book Money and Work Unchained at a 10% discount ($8.95 for the Kindle ebook and $18 for the print edition) through December, after which the price goes up to retail ($9.95 and $20).

Read the first section for free in PDF format.  If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.

[kflemhealth]

Pandemic, Lies and Videos - Charles Hugh Smith asks, "What were we thinking?" when the world denied the reality of the coronavirus pandemic

(Natural News) Charles Hugh Smith from OfTwoMinds.com is one of the best independent thinkers of the modern era. Today, he has penned a short but brilliant piece that asks how the entire world could remain totally oblivious to the exploding coronavirus pandemic that’s materializing right in front of our eyes, day by day. Somehow, the...

from NaturalNews.com https://ift.tt/2Uu7krt via IFTTT

[darkmaga-returns]

By Charles Hugh Smith

OfTwoMinds.com

November 1, 2024

By placing search/social media in the bucket of newspapers, radio and TV networks, perhaps we’ve obscured their true nature as “Digital Marketing Mechanisms.”

Language is a funny thing. If we don’t have a word for something, in some way it doesn’t exist. When we find a word in another language that describes this something, we borrow the word, for example schadenfreude from German and tsunami from Japanese.

If we use an existing word to describe something novel, we may mis-categorize it, in effect obscuring its true nature. For example, calling a whale a “fish” makes a certain kind of sense (an animal that lives in the sea), but it doesn’t capture the fact that the whale is a mammal, not a fish.

Which brings us to social media, and the possibility that it isn’t actually “media” at all, and we’ve obscured its true nature by mis-categorizing it as “media.” This distinction isn’t merely academic; it has significant real-world consequences.

Let’s begin with the “media” that existed when the the US Constitution was drafted and ratified. “Media” wasn’t a word in usage at the time, and what we understand today as “media” was understood as “the printed word” in newspapers, flyers, posters, periodicals and books. This is the origin of the Constitution’s focus on “free speech” and the “free press”: Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.

[increaseprofitonline2017-blog]

Let's Talk Bitcoin! #353 - Of Two Minds [ad_1]

On Today's Episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin...

Stephanie Murphy, Jonathan Mohan and Adam B. Levine sit down with thinker and Author Charles Hugh Smith

This episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin! was sponsored by EasyDNS.com and edited by Matthew Zipkin.

Thanks to Stephanie Murphy, Charles Hugh Smith, Jonathan Mohan and Adam B. Levine for participating in the discussion.

This episode featured music by Jared Rubens & the New Time. Any questions or comments? email adam@letstalkbitcoin.com

Links

https://oftwominds.com

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1517160960/

[ad_2] Source link Source URL: https://www.increaseprofitonline.com/2018/01/29/lets-talk-bitcoin-353-of-two-minds/

[pacienciaras]

Keiser Report en español: Una patata caliente.

En este episodio de Keiser Report, Max y Stacy comentan la demanda interpuesta por el administrador de MF Global contra PricewaterhouseCoopers por, en última instancia, la enorme y desastrosa apuesta sobre bonos europeos de Jon Corzine. En la segunda parte Max entrevista a Charles Hugh Smith, de OfTwoMinds.com, sobre si la Reserva Federal ha perdido ya el control o no.

[rielpolitik]

RESILIENT LIVING: 'Opting-Out', Neither Comply Nor Resist - By Charles Hugh Smith

Source – oftwominds.com “…The decay of social norms and status quo systems triggering an authoritarian tightening of the screws is a well-worn pattern throughout human history. It shouldn’t surprise us to be living this dynamic in real time. We don’t control the decay or the authoritarianism, but we do control our response” Neither Comply Nor Resist By Charles Hugh Smith The decay of social…

[bettybxiong]

Pandemic, Lies and Videos - Charles Hugh Smith asks, "What were we thinking?" when the world denied the reality of the coronavirus pandemic

(Natural News) Charles Hugh Smith from OfTwoMinds.com is one of the best independent thinkers of the modern era. Today, he has penned a short but brilliant piece that asks how the entire world could remain totally oblivious to the exploding coronavirus pandemic that’s materializing right in front of our eyes, day by day. Somehow, the...

from NaturalNews.com https://ift.tt/2Uu7krt from Betty Xiong https://ift.tt/2usKQMS

[roguenewsdao]

Where To Invest When (Almost) Everything's in a Bubble

I can't summarize all the ideas presented in the book in one brief blog entry, but some basic principles will serve us well when bubbles abound.

1. Risk cannot be disappeared, it can only be masked or transferred to others.When anyone claims an investment is low-risk, they're actually claiming either A) the risk has been obscured by fancy footwork or false claims, or B) the risk has been transferred to some mark, chump or bagholder--nowadays, that usually means the taxpayer, as profits are private and losses are socialized.

2. Value flows to what's scarce. As economist Michael Spence and his colleagues have noted, conventional capital--the kind issued by central banks and private banks--is not scarce and therefore has little value. Ditto for conventional labor. This is why the returns on conventional capital and labor are so low.

Spence et al. suggest that what's scarce in today's global economy are ideas that create new business models, new productivity tools and new goods/services: Labor, Capital, and Ideas in the Power Law Economy.

This suggests an investment strategy of identifying what's scarce, or what will soon be scarce, before everyone else.

3. Many things that are scarce and thus valuable cannot be bought on the global marketplace. The number one example of this is of course health, which is priceless because even having millions won't buy your health back when it's been lost.

Yes, you can get patched up with stents or costly meds or maybe score a black-market organ harvested from some unfortunate prisoner somewhere, but all this sort of thing merely keeps you alive; it doesn't actually restore health.

So any investment in health will pay extremely high dividends. It doesn't take a ton of cash to invest in one's health; most of the investment is behavioral.

Other examples of what can't be bought in the same way stocks, bonds and housing can be purchased: meaningful work, communities with a collective memory of how to get things done in the real world, a functioning community economy, etc.

Investing in work you find fulfilling and meaningful pays dividends that can't be bought on the marketplace. Once again, investing in one's skills and social/intellectual capital doesn't require much cash; thanks to YouTube University and many other free or low-cost sources, anyone can start acquiring the eight essential skills I lay out in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. The basic idea is to learn how to build your own career and job.

4. Comparing the relative value of various assets helps identify what's relatively overvalued and undervalued. The key word here is relative: to say something is absolutely undervalued is trickier than concluding something is undervalued compared to other asset classes.

For example, compare housing in the U.S. and global commodities. Based on the national Case-Shiller Index, house prices have reached new bubblicious levels. Thanks, Federal Reserve!

It's not much of a stretch to reckon that, hmm, valuations are looking a bit more likely to be overvalued here rather than undervalued.

Read the rest of Charles Hugh Smith's October 26, 2017 article at his site, OfTwoMinds.com. You can find a brief selection of Charles favorite books and films here. -- JWS

[stupendousrebelpuppy]

Who Protected Epstein for Decades, and Why?

Who Protected Epstein for Decades, and Why?

The Smoking Man

Source – oftwominds.com

– “…How is America any different from a corrupt developing-world kleptocracy organized to gratify a handful of oligarchs and their cronies?…Perhaps the “he was an intelligence asset” is just a tissue-thin cover for a much more destructive reality: those at the top of the American state have no moral compass at all. That honeypots and blackmail are…